Half Changed World

Trying a different approach than usual, this week I’ve got three different books to talk about, all of which are about parents who live in Manhattan.

First up is Love and other impossible pursuits, by Ayelet Waldman.  After reading Becca’s post about it, I couldn’t resist requesting it from the library.  It was a quick read, full of amusing references to Bugaboos and the craziness of preschool admissions in New York.  And while I was never entirely clear on what exactly was so compelling about Emilia’s husband, her affection for Central Park shone loud and clear.

The main story in Love&… is about Emilia’s ambivalent relationship with her five-year-old stepson. Stepfamilies are also at the heart of This is my daughter, by Roxana Robinson. If Waldman writes like Warhol painted, full of bright colors and pop references, then Robinson is the master of the black and white sketch, bringing out the spirit of her characters with a few deft strokes.   She tells the story of Peter and Emma’s failed first marriages and their attempts to build a family with their young daughters, moving smoothly across viewpoints, revealing each characters’ hopes and failings.

I got this one out from the library because I really liked Robinson’s collection, A perfect stranger and other stories, and wanted to see what she did with a novel.  Unfortunately, I was left thinking that this is almost a novel-length short story, without a real plot to move things along.  And at novel length, I found myself stumbling over some of the superficial details — what Upper East Side mother would ever let her daughter sit on her lap in the front seat of a moving car?

Last up is What do you do all day? by Amy Scheibe.  This one has been weighing on my conscience for a while, because I got it free from the publicist, and I felt an obligation to write about it.  (As you may recall, I don’t feel any obligation to say nice things about the books I get for free, but I do feel like I should acknowledge them.)  I started reading it when I got it, and was enjoying it, but then put it down for a while and never felt particularly compelled to pick it up.

When I did pick it up again, I found that I enjoyed this book.  The plot is flimsy, with the writing not quite strong enough to keep me suspending disbelief at some points.  But I liked Jennifer Bradley, Scheibe’s heroine.  She’s lovably imperfect, always feeling that those around her are happier with their lives, more on top of things.  She’s also nice — inviting an emotionally needy fellow mom to join her and her friends for lunch, knowing how much she’d want to be asked, something I can’t imagine Emilia ever doing.

Ultimately, What do you do all day? is a fantasy novel, a story of a world where you have the perfect response to racist putdowns on the spot (not 20 minutes too late), where you can waltz into a new, better kindergarten for your daughter the same day that her old teacher has a psychotic break, and where your old boss offers to hire you as partner, not assistant, after four years out of the work force.   Think of it as Bunny Planet for stressed out moms.

I can’t decide if I’m more pleased with all the recent attention that work-family issues have been getting in the mainstream media these days or frustrated that so much of the coverage is stuck on the same old groove, setting working (for pay) moms against at-home moms, and ignoring dads completely.

I love RebelDad’s suggestion that we should googlebomb the term "mommy wars" to refer to Miriam Peskowitz’s excellent book, The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars.  It’s a much more productive contribution to the discussion than the new book by Leslie Morgan Steiner that’s been getting a bunch of attention.  (See also Miriam’s blog, where she’s had some interesting posts this week about the NYTimes article on trends in women’s labor force participation.)

RebelDad’s ready to write off the Steiner book because of her stupid comments about dads in the interview with her posted on the Business Week working parents blog.  (He also points out this strong piece from Time online called "Bring on the Daddy Wars.")  I agree, if she can only find men "whose lives haven’t changed as much dramatically" it’s because she hasn’t been looking.  (She also said she couldn’t find any interesting blogs that talk about work-family issues — I posted some of my favorites in the comments section there.)

And yet, I don’t want to dismiss the book entirely, both because I want to take advantage of the big Random House publicity machine’s efforts to get these topics aired, and because Steiner gets some things exactly right.  In the Business Week interview, she says:

"I thought the battle was between stay-at-home and working moms. But women don’t fall into these neat categories. Most women see it as a continuum. A mom who left a hard-driving job may be at home now, but she plans on being back at work two years from now."

Yup.  And in the Post article she makes the point that the biggest mommy war is often internal, and tells a sweet story about the lift she got when her daughter’s preschool teacher complimented her:

"Did anyone ever tell you how beautiful you are?" Mrs. Rahim whispered so that the swirling crowd of stay-at-home moms, lingering by the school door, couldn’t hear. "You are a happy mom. Your face glows with it. That’s what matters most to your kids. I think you should have 10 more children. Now go to work."

So, it’s hard to know what to expect from the book.  One taste is provided by the excerpt from one of the essays published in Newsweek.  It’s by a woman who suggests that her children’s overall meltdown was due to her not being home to meet the school bus (even though she did in fact work from home two weeks a month, and her husband was home the rest of the time).

As I’ve said before, I’m generally sceptical about the degree to which you can draw a straight line from parental choices to children’s outcomes.  But even setting that aside, my reading of the essay is that, to the extent that Hingston contributed to her kids’ problems, it’s not because she was working, but because she felt so guilty about working that she had trouble setting limits, even when her son’s therapist and teachers all agreed that they were badly needed.  I’m quite curious whether Hingston draws the same conclusion in the full version of her essay.

This week’s book is Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt, the author of Angela’s Ashes.  It’s about his 30 years of teaching English in New York City public high schools, first in vocational schools and ultimately at Stuyvesant, one of the highly selective academic schools.  It’s a quick read, full of self-depreciating humor and well-told stories. It’s not as brilliant or compelling as Angela’s Ashes, but that’s a heck of a standard to try to live up to.

One of the ongoing themes of the book is how little respect teachers get.  More than once he points out that administrators and college professors get more respect and more money than teachers, and work a lot less hard.  He’s also somewhat sardonic about all the attention he got when Angela’s Ashes became a hit, after a lifetime of obscurity as a teacher.

The book is also an argument for teaching that doesn’t follow the curriculum, that doesn’t cover anything that’s going to be on a standardized test.  McCourt describes assigning his students to write excuse notes from Adam and Eve, of reading recipes out loud (and having a buffet of the results in the middle of Stuvesant Park).  He glories in the students who challenged him, and the bitterest passages in the book are aimed at the parents of the over-achieving Stuyvesant students, who worry about their grades, and whether his class will help them get into college.

McCourt had retired by the time I attended Stuyvesant, but his classes were still  legendary.  In spite of his complaints about the students’ sense of entitlement, a place like Stuyvesant seems ideal for a renegade teacher like McCourt– it didn’t matter that he wasn’t interested in teaching grammar, because the kids pretty much got it already.  Because of the self-depreciation, it’s hard to tell whether McCourt was a good teacher in his early years, when he started telling stories to his classes as a means of keeping bored and hostile students paying attention. 

My computer is on the fritz (just when I had almost finished doing our taxes on it!) so my blogging is likely to be light for a while.  I’ll check in from T’s computer, but probably won’t have much in the way of serious posts until I have it back in gear or give up and replace it.  (It’s scary, but the low-end machines are so cheap, that at any reasonable valuation of our time, it almost always makes sense to buy a new one.)

I did want to express my sadness at the unexpected death of Octavia Butler.   Fledgling wasn’t my favorite of her books, but she was a great writer.  I ran across this link to one of her short stories, Amnesty, today, and I recommend it to anyone who isn’t familiar with her work.  In miniature, it displays all the themes that Butler kept on returning to.

Interestingly, it seems that the news of her death spread across the blogosphere well before it was reported in the press.  Steven Barnes seems to have reported it first.  Edward Champion shares a nice memory of how Kindred rocked his world, and a roundup of posts from others.

Today’s book is Bringing Home the Bacon: Making Marriage Work When She Makes More Money, by Harriet Pappenheim and Ginny Graves.  It was on display at Powells when I visited over Thanksgiving, and the cover literally made me swivel my head as I walked by.  As soon as I got home, I hunted down the book and requested it from the library.

I’ve been taking an excellent free course at Barnes and Noble online on Thinking Like An Editor and it’s helped me understand why this book was appealing to an editor.  Improving your marriage is one of the perennial hot-selling book topics, and this book is aimed at a clearly defined and large group of women (1/3 of married women earn more than their husbands) that hasn’t been addressed before.  The authors’ credentials are impressive — a therapist and a journalist.  On the book jacket, they promise to address such important questions as "why working women still do more housework than their husbands — even when their husbands stay home" and "how couples can navigate financial decisionmaking when the breadwinner’s reins rest firmly in the wife’s hands."  They promise to answer them based on Pappenheim’s professional experience and interviews with 100 couples.

Unfortunately, all this didn’t actual make for a very good book.  As it turns out, 100 interviews is a challenging number to write a book about.  It’s not enough to say anything statistically valid about overall trends, but too many for individuals to stand out from the mass.  All the Susans and Bills and Daves blurred together, so you never got a clear picture of any one couple across the topics covered in each chapter (sex, money, housework, etc.)  Pappenheim and Graves never really answered the gripping questions that they posed.   And the advice they offer is so generic as to be useless.  (Their top recommendation for how to make marriage work when she earns more is "Make mutual respect priority Number one."  As opposed to every other marriage, where mutual respect isn’t important?)

Overall, I think the problem is that they discovered that marriages where the women earn more than their husbands don’t necessarily have that much in common.   As I could have told them, a lot depends on whether it’s voluntarily chosen.  In other words, is the husband a SAHD, a low-earning artist, or umemployed?  Some of the generalizations they reached for totally missed the mark for me (fatigue and lack of time may interfere with our sex life, but not lack of respect), while others seemed right on target:

"Women’s hunger for options, for leeway, for relief from the relentless grind, were recurrent themes in our interviews.  Perhaps when women pine for a male provider, what they’re really craving is greater latitude in a life that’s come to feel too restrictive. What’s clear is that when a career becomes just another kind of trap, limiting our options, dictating the course of our lives, many of us become disenchanted and start trying to find a way out… It’s possible (maybe even probable) that male breadwinners feel the same way about being trapped in the daily grind, but unless they are very wealthy, it never occurs to the majority of them that they have an option to stop working… They certainly don’t seriously feel that they are entitled to be taken care of by their wives.  But many women, consciously or unconsciously, feel entitled to being taken care of by their men."

Today’s book is Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, edited by Andrea J. Buchanan & Amy Hudock.  Specifically, this is one of the stops on Buchanan’s blog book tour.

The anthology is a selection of writing — poetry, memoir, fiction — from the Literary Mama website, and it’s truly a delight.  The first poem, Pregnancy, by Lori Romero, made me grin with recognition.  Johnny, by Heidi Raykeil, made me cry openly on the metro, wiping my nose on my coat sleeve because I didn’t have a tissue.  The authors write about the first day of school, and watching a grown child pack to leave the house.  They write about wrestling with the legacy of imperfect parenting handed down from their parents, and they write about parenting as imperfect humans themselves.

Some of the pieces made me nod, yes, that’s it, some seemed like maps to the strange countries I have yet to explore, and some made me wonder at how different my experience is from the authors’.  Barbara Crooker writes:

But to work is to abandon
to indifferent, casual hands,
what I, the potter, have worked
this demi-decade to achieve in you,
soft claygirl.

For me, one of the surprises of parenting has been how much my children are their own people, how little I feel that I am molding them.

In the introduction, Buchanan and Hudock discuss the conflicts between writing and motherhood.  I feel compelled to point out that writing is more compatible with motherhood than many careers.  The real problem is that (in most cases) it doesn’t pay very well, making it challenging to justify spending the money for child care in order to do it.  Furthermore, because writing doesn’t require you to leave home at set hours, many parents are tempted into thinking that they can be writers without having someone else provide child care.  And of course when you’re trying to squeeze anything into the margins of the day, you’re going to be cramped and frazzled.  But I really don’t think the conflict is something unique about writing.

My name is Elizabeth and I’m a book addict.

The vast majority of the books I read are from the library.  I have cards from two library systems — the city I live in, and the larger nearby county.  Both libraries have online catalogs, where you can search for books you want, and put holds on them if they’re out, or at a different branch.  So there’s usually a stack of books waiting for me every time I go.  The problem is that it’s easy to get carried away — I currently have 10 books checked out from one library, and 21 from the other.  (Yes, some of them are for the boys, who don’t have their own cards yet, but most of them are mine.) 

You can renew books online too, but only if no one else has put a hold on them, and there’s no way to check whether that’s the case in advance.  So it turns out I’ve got about 4 books that I haven’t started which are due this weekend and can’t be renewed.  So I’ve got to either return them unread, suck up the late fees, or sit up all night to finish them.  Probably some combination of the above.  (Even with the late fees, it’s much cheaper than buying the books, but I feel guilty about having overdue books, especially when I know someone else is waiting for them.)

If neither of the libraries that I use has a book, and I really want to read it, I’ll try to get it used, either from Powells or Amazon marketplace.   Powell’s has free shipping if you order $50 a time, which just encourages me to buy even more books.  And then I feel like I need to read the books I have out from the library first, so the ones I buy tend to sit around for a long time before I get to them.  One year I vowed not to buy any books until I read everything I owned that I hadn’t read.  I didn’t make it through the year, but I did catch up a bit.

I almost never buy new books for myself, but they’re my favorite thing to give as a gift, so I feel like I’m doing my share to keep the publishing industry afloat. 

For a total change of pace, today’s book is Fledgling.  It’s a vampire story, but since it’s by Octavia Butler, the main character is a vampire, Shori, who looks like a 10-year-old African-American girl.  Thus, the book is an opportunity for Butler to revisit some of her favorite themes from her award-winning Xenogenesis trilogy — race, human-alien mixtures, multi-member families.

Unfortunately, Fledgling is pretty weak compared to the Xenogenesis books.  What made them stunning is that Butler conveyed both the hope that the Oankali offered to humanity and the horror that humans felt about them.  The main characters are put in situations where there are no right choices, and they stumble through, sometimes hurting people around them in the process.

In Fledgling, almost all of the complexity is gone.  The "Ina" (vampires) are not monsters, but benevolent masters, who provide their human symbionts with orgasmic pleasure and healthy long lives.  The only exceptions are the bad guys, who have no redeeming characteristics — they’re even racist.  The lingering discussions of the complex families of the Ina (sibling groups marry each other, but live in single sex communities) and their human companions reminded me of nothing so much as Heinlein’s late novels in which he waxed ecstatic about group marriages.  (And yes, many sci-fi writers would give their right arm to be compared to even lousy Heinlein, but Butler’s better than that.)

And, to be honest, I couldn’t figure out what was the point of making Shori appear to be a young child.  There’s no portion of the book where she has to live with the restrictions on her activities that minors are usually subject to.  And I was ooked out by the sex/feeding scenes between her and adult humans. 

All this said, I read the book in a weekend, and found myself staying up later than I should have to finish it.  Even at her weakest, Butler’s a compelling storyteller.

Today’s book is Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.  He wrote it shortly after he graduated from law school, when he attracted attention as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and it was reprinted in 2004 after his stunning keynote address at the Democratic Convention. 

I was a big fan of Obama before reading this book (see here and here), and it confirmed my enthusiasm for him.  He writes eloquently of the contradictions of his life — a black man whose only family as a child was white (he only met his father once, when he was 10, and didn’t meet the Kenyan side of his family until he was an adult), a community organizer who had instant credibility in inner city Chicago because of the color of his skin, but who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia.  And he recognizes the contradictions of others’ lives, but points them out without judgement.  He’s capable of both acknowledging how important Harold Washington’s election as Mayor of Chicago was to many African-Americans and of pointing out how little business as usual changed as a result.

The American Prospect has a cover story on Obama this month.  It notes that he has been — deliberately — low profile in the Senate over the past year, but that he clearly dreams big.  The part I found most interesting was about his ability to disagree with people, to vote against them, and still leave them feeling respected and listened to.  That’s a rare, and powerful, talent.  I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Obama does when he’s no longer worrying about stepping on his colleagues’ toes.

Today’s book is All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi.  Moxie has it on her list of "highly recommended" books on her sidebar, so I requested it from the library.

All Your Worth is basically an amplification of the financial advice provided in the last chapter of their first (mostly policy-oriented) book, The Two-Income Trap.  In that book, they argued that most families get into financial trouble not by overspending on shoes or lattes, but by committing too much of their income into fixed costs — especially housing — so that they have no ability to cope with unexpected emergencies — the loss of a job, a medical crisis.  Therefore, they propose a financial plan that won’t get you rich quick, but will keep you out of debt and bankruptcy.

Their plan is simple: Never spend more than 50 percent of your take-home pay on "Must Haves" — housing, insurance, car payments, and any other long-term commitments.  Save 20 percent (either in the form of obvious savings, or by paying off debt).  The remaining 30 percent can be spent on anything you want — nicer food, clothing, charity, electronic toys — as long as they don’t involve ongoing commitments.  Pay cash for your wants, and put at least 20 percent down before buying a house.  As Warren and Tyagi themselves say, their plan is in many ways a throwback to 30 or 40 years ago, when credit wasn’t readily available to everyone, and bankers wouldn’t loan you more money than they realistically thought you would pay back.  They’re explicitly encouraging you to live less luxuriously than most people at your income level — but to have the security of knowing that you won’t be knocked off course by a setback.

This isn’t rocket science — it’s very similar to the "60 percent solution" offered by MSN Money editor Richard Jenkins.   And Warren and Tyagi acknowledge that there are times that it’s not going to work — when you have a new baby, when someone in the family is seriously ill, when you’ve just lost a job, are going back to school, or are starting a new business.  But they argue that you should know when you’re in those special circumstances — and set a specific time when your budget will be back in balance.

Probably the least satisfying part of this book for me was the discussion of housing costs.  Warren and Tyagi argue that housing hasn’t, on average, appreciated any faster than inflation, so there’s no point in going into hock in order to get into the market sooner rather than later.  That may be true about the country as a whole, but certainly not if you want to live in a coastal urban area.  In their first book, they wrote quite poignantly about how people were going into hock in order to get their kids into good school districts; in this book, they simply say "don’t do it."

I haven’t done the exact calculations that Warren and Tyagi recommend, but I’m pretty confident that we’re within the proportions that they recommend.  So I can testify to their general point — if you keep the big expenses under control, you don’t have to scrimp on the little ones.  (We have memberships with both NetFlix and GreenCine.)  But I’m the first to admit that a lot of our "wisdom" is actually luck — we bought our house 8 1/2 years ago, and so our mortgage is very managable.  If we were buying for the first time today, we’d be in a very different situation.